2 Answers
2

Unfortunately, I don't think posting it anywhere else will help you. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news twice in one day, but I don't think you have enough information there to show the results you want. All that's stored is the number of views, but to group them by month you also need some better idea of when each view occurred.

I think the best you can do is an approximation that credits all the views for a question on the creation date. It's not horrible, since most posts gets most of their views in the first few hours. But it's going to short you in some important ways: posts near the end of month, new links that bump old content, etc.

It's definitely doable, just a tricky query to develop. On the aggregate, all questions have the same tail pattern (dont have stats on hand, but it was like 9 9 8 7 7 5 1 1 1...) and there is a constant growth rate (say, 13%); I just need to figure out how to account for those instead of doing a (ViewCount/MonthsOpen).
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Alex PapadimoulisSep 10 '09 at 15:29

Regarding the tail: we can derive that based on recent vs. old questions. A 1-2 week old question has (say) 100 views/week; a 3 week has 80/week, a 4-6 week has 70/week, and so on. So, we can use this to predict how newly-asked questions will behave.
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Alex PapadimoulisSep 10 '09 at 15:33

@Joel - Where is the sketchy? If you are seeing 1k page views in the previous dump and 1500 views in this dump, thats 500 views in the time between.
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Rob AllenSep 10 '09 at 16:03

It's sketchy because to be reliable over time it requires fully automating the monthly data dump process, and that's a non-trivial operation at the moment.
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Joel CoehoornSep 10 '09 at 16:10

I see. You mean Sketchy as in potentially a pain. I was thinking Sketchy as in underhanded/dubious
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Rob AllenSep 10 '09 at 18:07